Dubai-based Dutch national Dr Salomon Jacobus “Cobus” van Rooijen has snapped up an 84.84 % voting stake in Karachi-listed ZIL Ltd., the 71-year-old maker of Capri beauty soap and other personal-care staples.
In a notice to the Pakistan Stock Exchange dated 15 May 2025, ZIL disclosed that Van Rooijen’s vehicle TWF Holding LLC-FZ purchased 5,194,514 shares at Rs297.50 apiece on 12 May, valuing the block at Rs1.55 billion ($5.5 million). The seller, intriguingly, is New Future Consumer International General Trading LLC, another single-member UAE company also wholly owned by Van Rooijen.
The internal reshuffle hands the 59-year-old executive direct control of Pakistan’s oldest private soap maker and positions him as board chairman. Yet the match-up of a career beer salesman with a consumer-goods minnow in a country where alcohol is largely prohibited raises more questions than the terse PSX filing answers.
Van Rooijen is no stranger to consumer brands — but almost all of them fizz. According to the résumé published on ZIL’s website, he spent the 2000s running Castle Brewing Namibia and sat on the executive boards of Heineken Russia and Amber Beverage Group Latvia. Earlier still, he was global exports director at SABMiller. He later added stints in Dutch wax-print fashion house Vlisco BV, but his professional centre of gravity has been beer: route-to-market overhauls, acquisition due diligence and emergency turnarounds from Africa to Eastern Europe.
Today he operates from Dubai as managing director of New Future Consumer International (NFCI), hunting for fast-moving-consumer-goods (FMCG) assets and joint ventures. His personal holding outfits (NFCI and now TWF) are the ones funding the ZIL play. The content in this publication is expensive to produce. But unlike other journalistic outfits, business publications have to cover the very organizations that directly give them advertisements. Hence, this large source of revenue, which is the lifeblood of other media houses, is severely compromised on account of Profit’s no-compromise policy when it comes to our reporting. No wonder, Profit has lost multiple ad deals, worth tens of millions of rupees, due to stories that held big businesses to account. Hence, for our work to continue unfettered, it must be supported by discerning readers who know the value of quality business journalism, not just for the economy but for the society as a whole.To read the full article, subscribe and support independent business journalism in Pakistan
